Rick Holmes: 'Thanks for your service'?

Monday

Jun 9, 2014 at 3:57 PM

There will be no homecoming parade for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The people of Hailey, Idaho, who have waited for five years for their native son to be freed, have canceled the celebration because of the threat of protests and violence.

Rick Holmes

There will be no homecoming parade for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The people of Hailey, Idaho, who have waited for five years for their native son to be freed, have canceled the celebration because of the threat of protests and violence.

Maybe it’s just as well. Given the other things veterans are coming home to — unemployment, homelessness and mental illness, not to mention the VA — a homecoming parade can seem like a pretty hollow gesture. And outside of his family and friends, people aren’t sure they really want to celebrate Bowe Bergdahl.

Bergdahl himself would probably prefer to do without the flag-waving, thanks-for-your-service stuff anyway. When he walked away from his company in 2009, at least, he was bitter about his country, his unit and his mission.

“I am sorry for everything here,” Bowe wrote in an email to his parents. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.”

Bergdahl’s story isn’t new, though you’d think so from the way some politicians are dancing around the issues raised by the deal that freed him in return for five Guantanamo prisoners. Michael Hastings told it in great detail two years ago in Rolling Stone.

Hastings describes Bergdahl as an unusual kid who probably had no business in the Army to begin with. Home-schooled and raised in the Idaho mountains, he had an interest in ethics and a taste for adventure. He tried to join the French Foreign Legion, but was rejected. The Army, so desperate for recruits in 2008 that it waived its requirements on criminal histories, drug use and intellectual abilities for one soldier out of five, took him in.

Bergdahl’s platoon reflected those lower standards. Hastings’ reporting, along with documentary footage from a British filmmaker embedded with the unit in Afghanistan, shows a company undermanned, poorly-trained and undisciplined. That they are turning on each other now is no surprise; they were squabbling before they even finished their training.

Bergdahl was an idealist who never fit in. He studied philosophy and war manuals while the others were out partying. He read “Three Cups of Tea” and taught himself Pashto, the language spoken in eastern Afghanistan. Bergdahl had bought into the counter-insurgency theories of Gen. David Petraeus. His mission was to help the Afghan people build a new nation. “He spent more time with the Afghans than he did with his platoon,” one soldier told Hastings.

But the other soldiers mocked and mistreated the villagers, Bergdahl told his parents as he steadily soured on the project. We’ve seen how soldiers have responded to the stress and futility of war on that faraway battlefield. Some commit violence against each other and against civilians. Many have taken their own lives. Bergdahl had a different response. After he finished guard duty one night, he left behind his rifle and sensitive equipment and just walked away. Hastings concluded Bergdahl intended to hike down the mountains to Pakistan. Before long, he was in the hands of the Taliban.

Now, after five years in captivity, Bowe Bergdahl is free — and has been dropped into the center ring of America’s political circus. We argue over whether he’s a victim or a villain, whether President Obama paid too high a price to bring this POW home, whether he should be court-martialed before or after Congress grills everyone responsible for negotiating his release.

The Obama administration has long considered securing Bergdahl’s return as a step in ending America’s war in Afghanistan. Prisoner exchanges usually come toward the close of hostilities, and the negotiations over Bergdahl were seen as preliminary to the political settlement needed to bring stability to Afghanistan.

That context has been missing from this week’s debate. America still isn’t ready to tackle the lessons of its longest-running war. We’d rather use Sgt. Bergdahl as a punching bag.

Hastings, who was killed in a car crash a year ago, made an attempt: “Bowe’s own tour of duty in Afghanistan mirrored the larger American experience in the war — marked by tragedy, confusion, misplaced idealism, deluded thinking and, perhaps, a moment of insanity. And it is with Bowe that the war will likely come to an end.”

Like Bergdahl, America went to war impulsively, and it turned out to be a lot harder than we expected. We tried to win over hearts and minds, but warriors aren’t good at that. Like him, we soured on the whole enterprise and are now in the process of just walking away.

As we do, we’re quarrelling over whether a screwed up American who’s been locked up for five years is worth five burned-out Afghans who’ve been locked up for 12 years. The last American POW is coming home, and we don’t even know whether to throw a party.

It turns out saying “thanks for your service” isn’t as easy as we thought.